The Punisher

Gerry Conway, John Romita Sr., Ross Andru, [Mike Baron, Len Wein, Stan Lee], and Steve Lightfoot, 2017

I’ve already written about the original idea behind the Punisher and how that got warped by the audience response, back when I wrote about the second season of the Daredevil show; if you don’t want to click that link, here’s the relevant paragraph:

A common trick in defining a character is to contrast him with a distorted reflection. For instance: the people who wrote comic books in the 1970s tended to be a countercultural lot, and consequently for years Captain America was written as the biggest bleeding heart this side of Tsarevich Alexei. When Mark Gruenwald took over the writing chores on Cap’s book in the mid-’80s, he introduced a new character called the Super-Patriot, a dim-witted, ’roided-up right-winger more in tune with the era of Reagan and Rambo, and used him as a foil for the title character. “Who is this ‘Captain America’ walking around in a flag costume and getting into fights, you ask? Well, he’s not this other guy walking around in a flag costume and getting into fights! Let’s explore how they differ!” The Punisher has a similar story. He started off as a Spider‑Man villain in the mid-’70s. Spider‑Man, famously, was a teenager inspired to fight crime by the murder of his beloved uncle, and took it upon himself to patrol the streets of New York, socking baddies in the jaw and webbing them up for the cops to collect. Readers were meant to be outraged that the local paper would tar Spider‑Man as a menace… but as Mark Millar might point out, in the real world a teenager who takes it upon himself to head into the city and mete out violence to those he has decided are the baddies is not “Spider‑Man” but “Kyle Rittenhouse”. So what if the idea behind Spider‑Man were pushed a couple of steps further? Change “murdered uncle” to “murdered wife and children”, change “teenager” to “combat-savvy Vietnam vet”, and change “socking baddies in the jaw” to “blowing baddies away with high-powered assault weapons”⁠—et voilà, the Punisher! “Who is this ‘Spider‑Man’? Okay, sure, he’s a vigilante… but he’s not that kind of vigilante!” Except it turned out that readers, especially in the high-crime era of Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and Taxi Driver, quite liked that kind of vigilante. In the discourse of strength and weakness, a one-man death squad who gunned down legions of foot soldiers of druglords and mafiosi wasn’t a bad guy⁠—he was a badass. So the Punisher was quickly turned from villain to antihero to star, landing his own limited series, then an ongoing series, then a second series running alongside the first, Punisher War Journal. Early on in the Punisher’s ascent, Frank Miller poached him from the Spider-books for a Daredevil arc. The Punisher made an even better foil for Daredevil than for Spider‑Man, as Daredevil was a darker form of vigilante: trained as a ninja, prone to dishing out brutal beatings, and romantically entangled with the assassin Elektra. His M.O. was very close to that of the Punisher. But Daredevil didn’t kill. The Punisher did. There’s your contrast, and thus your theme.

Seeing this series pop up on the Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline I’ve been following really tested my commitment to MCU completism. Marvel has plenty of characters who bore me⁠—like, really? a few years from now I gotta sit through a movie about fuckin’ Morbius?⁠—but toward the Punisher my apathy turns into antipathy. To put forward the Punisher as a hero and find enough of an audience to turn him into a hit character is a sign of a culture that has taken a dark turn. But I did once buy one Punisher comic, a special from 2004: Punisher: The End, set in a world that a full nuclear exchange has reduced to radioactive ash, with no one left alive except for a handful of survivors in a high-tech bunker⁠—and Frank Castle, determined to make sure they won’t be survivors for long. The good reviews and my interest in nuclear war stories got me to shell out my $4.50, and I have to confess, it lived up to the hype: nearly twenty years later, I remember it vividly, whereas most of the comics I have read in the 21st century I have forgotten by the time the next issue comes out. And I am astonished to say that this TV series, or at least the first season of it, was similarly far better than I had anticipated. I still have reservations about it, but my expectations were rock bottom, and this turned out to be on par with the best of the Netflix Marvel series.

As I say in article after article, one of the strengths of the MCU is that each property slots into a different genre, and this is… whatever we’re calling all those post-9/11 things with CIA, FBI, and DHS agents trying to track down terrorists, elite special ops teams getting sent in to take them down, those agents and soldiers becoming broken people, moral rot setting in across all these organizations⁠—the sort of thing we see in Homeland, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Sicario, etc., etc. In The Punisher, the terrorist setting off bombs in New York is domestic, but he was psychologically destroyed by his deployment in Afghanistan⁠—as was the Punisher himself, both directly (being turned into a murder machine) and indirectly (because his family was killed by a rogue faction of the national security apparatus in order to cover up a black ops program in Kandahar whose leaders were trafficking heroin, smuggling the drugs back to the U.S. in dead troops’ corpses). What’s interesting about this to me is that the Punisher was introduced in the comics as a Vietnam vet⁠—because, by 1974, when the character first appeared, U.S. involvement in Vietnam was already seen as a colossal mistake that had done terrible damage to the men who were sent there. It says something that the showrunners here could smoothly swap in Afghanistan and not really have to change anything⁠—i.e., that the Bush/Cheney wars are seen much the same way today that Vietnam was at the end of the 20th century. It’s one of the few positions that transcends partisanship, as Donald Trump was able to maneuver the old guard out of the Republican Party by proclaiming that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had been “a big fat mistake”⁠—a stance that had been anathema among Republican politicians and donors but that proved to resonate among the rank and file. Similarly⁠—in the era of The Godfather, to have Frank Castle’s wife and children get killed because they’d blundered across a Mafia execution was in tune with the zeitgeist, but not so much nowadays… and it says something that the showrunners’ solution was also to lean on the Bush/Cheney legacy. Vietnam was certainly associated with atrocities⁠—the My Lai massacre, the napalming of children⁠—but some were able to dismiss these as the fault of a few out-of-control grunts, or a sobering reminder of the grim but inevitable horrors of war. The post-9/11 wars, though⁠—those secret prisons and torture programs were instituted from the top. In their aftermath, it seems only natural for the Big Bad of a series like this to be a member of the CIA top brass who gets a sexual thrill out of beating Afghan cab drivers to death.

And of course you also have to make a move like that because if you’re going to make a brutal mass murderer your protagonist⁠—brutal as in “gouges out the eyes of his foe with his thumbs while bellowing ‘YOU! DAHHH-YIEEE! GYUHHH!!’”⁠—you have to make the antagonists that much worse, at least if you want to air on a network more progressive than OAN. Even so, by casting him not just as a protagonist but as a hero, you commit yourself to taking the line that it’s okay for murder machines to go on killing sprees so long as you agree that the people they kill did in fact need killin’. That seems like an unworkably solipsistic philosophy given that not everyone’s hit list is the same. And The Punisher does ultimately cast its title character as a hero, trotting out Karen Page to vouch for his moral code and mock a senator who supports gun control for hiring armed guards after receiving death threats from a known bomber. (This is logic along the lines of “If you support higher taxes, why don’t you just unilaterally send more of your own money to the government?”) At the end of the season, all the remaining officials on the good and neutral lines of the alignment chart give Frank a clean slate in gratitude for services rendered, which sounds like the sort of denouement you’d see at the dystopian movie theater in A Mind Forever Voyaging. So, yeah, gruesome and problematic⁠—but, I have to admit, well made. I started the series playing in a window, thinking that I would grind through it as background noise while I worked on other stuff, but the plot grabbed me in a way that no canonical Punisher stories ever have, and by the midpoint of the season I was genuinely interested in what would happen next.

Still, next up is the live-action adaptation of Runaways, and I really hope they include the bit where the Punisher discovers that all the special ops training in the world avails him nothing in a showdown with Princess Powerful.